Latest release: The Shape of Punk to Come, the band’s genre-fucking and heavily studio-manipulated swan song, was also its masterpiece.

Why you care: Probably not for the
reasons Refused always wanted you to care. The band’s stated
agenda—written via lengthy liner-note dissertations more bratty than
substantial, and a 1998 breakup “communiquè” that included the line “WE
THEREFORE DEMAND THAT EVERY NEWSPAPER BURN ALL THEIR PHOTOS OF
REFUSED”—was to “overthrow the class system, burn museums and to
strangle the great lie that we call culture.” The real reason you care,
though, probably has more to do with the band’s incredible final record,
its oft-mythicized live show (mic tricks galore!) and the pure
unlikeliness of this reunion ever happening. The band’s more recent
transmissions have been humble and largely apolitical (“we should have
been forgotten by now, but [we were] not, and why that is is near
impossible to figure out”), which is sure to confound longtime fans
still trying to decipher whether this purported last hurrah—a tour of
late-night TV shows, heavily sponsored festivals and mid-sized venues
with prohibitively expensive ticket costs—is an abandonment of the
group’s revolutionary ideals or an admission that the Refused Party
Program was always meant as theater. Either way, the boys are taking
their live shows deathly seriously, and they just won’t be able to rock
this hard in another 14 years.